Were outside agitators to blame for chaos?
By: Alex Nussbaum
NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network - New Jersey
..... Paula Rogovin - a 78-year-old veteran of countless protests, demonstrations and rallies - had sinking feelings when state troopers rolled up outside Newark's Delaney Hall.
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The New Jersey State Police, ostensibly there to lower temperature outside the embattled Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, came loaded for bear - decked out in riot helmets and shields, on heavy trucks loaded with concrete barriers and fencing and with vans full of horses for crowd control.
..... "I said, 'This is going to be trouble. They are coming in so aggressively,'' recalled Rogovin, a longtime Teaneck activists who had been demonstrating outside Delaney Hall for more than a year.
..... After a week of tense, sometimes violent conformities outside the center, Rogovin and other activists have no doubt where the blame should lie - even if Governor Mikie Sherrill and conservative media have become strange bedfellows blaming outside agitators for the clashes along Doremus Avenue.
..... "I believe strongly that the violence initiates with ICE," Rogovin told me in an interview. "ICE is kidnapping people from the streets, from their work, from their houses. That's the violence begins, along with the conditions in Delaney Hall, the lack of due process, the lack of health and mental helaht care, the food."
..... After several days of rough treatment by ICE, the state police took over crowd control outside the facility but brought the same vibe, she said.
..... And yet the images form last weekend, [05/30-31/2026] while they may not tell a full story, do tell a seductive one: On news sites and social media accounts, the public saw protesters clad in black, faces masked, screaming and cursing at law enforcement, shouting through bullhorns inches from offers' faces.
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Fires were set in the street, metal barricades deployed as weapons. One Brooklyn man was charged with threatening to kill an ICE agent and his family. State officials said police moved in to disperse demonstrators on the night of Friday, May 29, [2026] after being targeted with gas canisters and fireworks (through those claims were disputed). Dozens were arrested.
..... Far from a scene of righteous civilians facing jackbooted feds, it was a tableaux of revolution, a military facing off against a militia.
..... Sherrill has called for Delaney Hall's closure but also wared of "people coming form out of state to cerate chaos and dangerous situations.
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Progressive activists seethed over the reference. They wondered why clashes outside the faculty were suddenly getting media attention when he'd spent over a year trying to call attention to callous conditions inside its walls.
..... But fair or not, the ugly scenes mater to public perception. Work by researches including Omar Wasow, a political scientist at the University of California- Berkley, and sociologist Rob Willer at Stanford has found that reports of violence can transform how classic movements are viewed and thus their success.
..... Few people will actually attend an Immigration protest: many will see its most triggering moments on Twitter and TikTok.
..... Where governments respond brutally to peaceful protest, they can loose support, said Wasow, who has studied the 1960s civil rights movement and its impacts on U.S. elections.
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"When activist are considered to be the aggressors, the initiators of violence," he said, "the public response is often more sympathetic to the police, to concerns about law and order, and that tends to undermine the cause of the movement."
Who really was protesting?
..... So which Delaney Hall narrative is the right one?
..... Eyewitness accounts from demonstrators, as well as from two NorthJersey.com journalists who were at the scene for much of the weekend [05/30-31/2026] - photographer Julian Leshay Guadalupe and reporter Hannan Adely - painted a picture of a crowd that yes, was angry, but which was mainly fleeing from or reacting to heavy-handed measures deployed by state police.
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Troopers rushed pell-mell into crowds, some on horseback, and pushed around protesters and media alike. They came in with little warning and with no attempt beforehand to arrange a peaceful deescalation. Newark police took over the scene on Monday [06/01/2026] and have so far had more success with a lighter touch - sharing information an initiating discussions with organizers rather than charging into crowds.
..... But clearly, some protesters came ready for a fight,if bot looking for one. Many of them were young, and some did come from outside the community.
..... Rogovin met a demonstrator who had previously protested in Minneapolis, where federal immigration agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti earlier this year, [2026]
as well as near "alligator Alcatraz," the South Florida migrant lockup. Word of a detainee huger strike inside Delaney Hall and images of ICE tear-gassing Senator Andy Kim and other protesters turned Newark into America's latest stand-your-ground crucible.
..... "All around the world, people are seeing what is happening at Delaney Hall, and there is a stepping up of the movement," said Rogovin, who acknowledged that some "provocaturs" had been drawn to the fray.
..... Kathy O'Leary, the New Jersey coordinator for Pax Christi, which advocates for immigrant rights, said of some who showed up," "it's a definitely a more militant style than we have."
..... "we belove in non-violence as a coalition, and for a whole year, our policy [at Delaney Hall], our way of operating, has been you don't tangle with ICE, you don;t tangle with the guards, because what you do outside gets reflected inside" in treatment of detainees.
..... But "we know that not everybody believes the same things we do, not everybody thinks the same way we do," she said.
..... In the United States, O'Leary said, "We always have money for bombs, bullets and border walls, but we don't have money for housing and education, and people are angry that they don't have those things. That's a volatile mix."
..... Lason Little, a community organize from Elizabeth has stood outside Delaney Hall almost every night since the hunger strike began in late May [2026] ICE agents shoved, pepper-spraed and chased down demonstrators, pushing some into traffic, he said. After state police arrived, Little said, he was hit by a rubber bullet in the shoulder while trying to live-stream their actions. By contrast, he said, he saw nothing from protesters hat he would term excessive or aggressive.
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Sherrill's warning about people crossing the line, he said, was "the same establishment playbook by politicians we know all [expletive] us up, to exempt her law enforcement officers from brutalizing us and terrorizing us and, like i said, damn near murdering us."
Resurgence of politician violence?
..... Social scientists have found that violence related to American political movements has generally declined compared with the 196s and 1970s, the era of the Weather Underground, the radical Puerto Rican independence movement and eco-sabotage, Wasow said.
..... "But I think it feels very alive and vivid right now, in part because we get this remarkable footage from the front lines, in our feeds or on TV," he said. "And so even as the actual numbers have declined, I think people's perception is that it feels more out of control."
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In some ways, violence can benefit the extreme open all sides of the conflict. For better or worse, the media - and voters = pay more attention when batons swing and tear gas files into crowds. For a while at least, the Trump administration seemed to welcome opportunities to show force against progressive demonstrators, although the calculation may have changed with outrage over the surge in Minneapolis.
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"There's this almost choreographed quality to it: The state engages in a spectacle of repression. Protesters are engaging in acts of resistance their are their own spectacles,' Wason added. "But its' still much more kind of contained than what we saw sometimes in 2020 and definitely in the 1960s.
..... Robovin and O'Leary were adamant: whatever tinder was provided by unruly protesters paled in comparison with the gasoline thrown on the fire by ICE agents and state troopers at Delaney Hall. And whatever attention is lavished on the fleeting outbursts outside the building would be better spent on the plight of immigrants inside - aw well as others swept up in the administrations deportation system. Despite the president's rhetoric, ICE's own statistics show that the vast majority of those detained are not hardened criminals.
..... "we should be angry about Delaney Hall," said O'Leary. "We should absolutely be angry. We should be blinded by anger about Delaney Hall."
..... Yet images tell a powerful story, one that could overwhelm the one that immigration advocates have about Delaney. It is a mistake that the movement will keep repeating if it can't focus its anger with discipline.
..... Alex Nussbaum, a veteran New Jersey journalist who has worked as a reporter and an editor covering the environment, business local news in the Garden state, is opinion editor for NorthJersey.com and The Record.